We’ve looked at several sources for music on the internet. Sites like Pandora or Last.FM are useful when you want someone else to pick the music for you. There’s certainly a role for this, but there are times when you just want to hear one specific song, and then these types of user [...]
Monday, December 31, 2007
It’s quite common for a category of software to get dominated by a particular program. For example, for word processing it’s Word, and for image manipulation it’s Photoshop. Heck, even our operating system is dominated by Windows. It should come as no surprise that optical disc burning is dominated by one program, [...]
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
For some reason, many of us think that everything on the internet is free, and for the amazingly low price nothing, we want it all. No where is that more true than when it comes to music. There is no shortage of places to download music, but for the last few years, the [...]
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Whatever shiny new music player you listen to, at some point, you’ll need to put those headphones away, and listen through the stereo in the car. Having a loaded up mp3 player can make a long car trip, or daily commute, at least a notch or two more civilized and tolerable.
Unfortunately, even if you [...]
Thursday, September 20, 2007
It’s Not Easy Being Green…
I’m always on the lookout for the next”big thing,” and I thought at first that the new SpiralFrog service just might be it. It’s been talked about for months, and this week it just came out of beta. While we already can get free music on our computers over the [...]
Now that Bluetooth devices have almost become commonplace, headphones are evolving too. Quite popular are those Bluetooth earpieces that are designed for cell phone use (that make you look like a little cyborg). There are also wireless headphones designed to be used with media players that allow us to cut the cord. [...]
Imagine for a minute that we’re an electronics company executive telling our engineers to design a really great entry level music player. Here’s what we would come up with. Firstly, the player needs to have one to two gigs of storage capacity. Add in a slot for removable memory cards so we never max out [...]
There are three ways to get audio from an mp3 player into your car stereo: a cassette adapter, an FM transmitter, or a dedicated dock. For those car owners fortunate to have an iPod or other player, but not fortunate to have a dock, or a cassette deck then the FM transmitter becomes the [...]
I’m still on the quest to find digital ripping perfection, and my next stop was Exact Audio Copy. I’ve been playing with version 0.95, which is currently in beta. The last time I looked at this software, the CD database it connects to was not active, so I moved on to other solutions. [...]
Last year when I looked at music file formats and software, I leaned towards iTunes as reasonable way to create mp3 music files from CD’s. This year when I built my new desktop, I decided to reexamine my choice. As of late, I was finding iTunes a little to resource hungry, and not [...]
Quite often, one piece of technology while solving one problem, creates another unforeseen one. More specifically, while I love listening to MP3’s in the car, I often have problems with the volume. This issue is hardly new, as CD’s were quite often not all produced at the same volume. However, when I [...]
Monday, December 18, 2006
After you’ve got a bunch of media on your hard drive, before long, the need arises to convert it from one format to another. For example, let’s say that the music file is in the “Windows friendly” WMA format, and you want to put it on your iPod that won’t play the format. [...]
Logitech is well known for some sleek computer peripherals, most notably their mice. They’ve been making speakers for quite some time now. It seems that every year, the speaker manufacturers put their best effort into their top end speaker systems that involve complete surround sound and monstrous subwoofers. On the other hand, [...]
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Opening the Pandora’s Box of music…
Now that you’ve got that new iPod, filling it up becomes the hard part. With room for so many songs, unless you’re a music aficionado, it can become a time consuming activity to find enough tunes so that there is enough variety to listen to. Personally, somewhere around [...]
While it is quite common knowledge that Apple’s insanely popular iPod line is the number one music player, it is a lesser known fact that SanDisk is the solid number two provider of music players. The SanDisk Corporation is better known for their flash memory, and originally, they looked upon these players simply as [...]
